A Tourist in Hollywood
By Tom Teicholz at 22 February, 2008, 12:09 pm
Last Friday, my daughter had the day off from school, and I had an errand to run in Hollywood (I needed to pick up a new press pass from the LA Press Club), so she came with me, lured by the promise of some Hollywood sight-seeing.
We had a specific mission: my daughter wanted to see John Wayne‘s hand/boot prints at Grauman’s Chinese Theater.
John Wayne? You might wonder why she would even know his name.
Give up?
Here’s the answer: There is an episode of “I love Lucy” in which Lucy, visiting California somehow manages to break the block of cement that has John Wayne’s impressions, and then has to find a way to trick him into making a new one. I had told her that she could probably see the original in Hollywood. Since then she’s been slightly obsessed by the idea of seeing all these hand and foot prints.
So on a clear Friday afternoon, we pulled into the parking lot of Hollywood and Highland. We emerged into the mall, and found ourselves with a great view of the Hollywood sign.
Our first stop, at my daughter’s request, was the Guinness Book of Records Museum. At the box office, the upsell begins immediately with a combo ticket offer to the Hollywood Wax Museum. My daughter being a wax museum aficionado, she insisted.
The Guiness Museum has a lot of info to offer, but if you are not interested in reading, the display is rather lame –and throughout the exhibit there are all sorts of machines asking you to pump change into them for various souvenirs. We ran through there pretty quickly.
On to the Wax Museum across the street, which my daughter adjudged to be lacking the artistry of Madame Tussaud‘s in Vegas — the wax itself seemed less good, and the replicants lacked in verisimilitude (there’s a word I’ve been wanting to use!). There also seemed to be a lot of emphasis on stars of yesteryear, even on TV shows of yesteryear. My daughter, despite having had little interest in the exhibits, still thought it was fun. That is the gift of being her age — discernment does not lessen pleasure. Not yet.
We walked back to Grauman’s and like the other other tourists gawked at the names of the stars on the sidewalk, and the differentiators between Tv, music, film and radio stars. My daughter wondered if Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers had done theirs yet.
The Grauman’s handprints did not disappoint. We found John Wayne’s and we got into a nice conversation with some visitors from Australia about the stars of their youth…..We found the Marx Brothers and my daughter was delighted to point out that Harpo had signed by drawing a harp with an “o” next to it.
Our good luck was to be thirsty in Grauman’s plaza where in return for a $2 soft drink purchase we received the all important parking validation allowing us only pay $3.00 for parking. A coup to be sure!
There was only one way to cap our tourist expedition — and that was with lunch at Carney’s, the train car, located on the Sunset Strip, where my daughter enjoyed a hamburger and I the Carney’s dog.
For an afternoon we were tourists in our own town. There are worse ways to spend a few hours (trust me I know).
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